Breaking now, Judge Emmet Sullivan has granted a preliminary injunction that orders the Department of Justice to either release a number of specific Epstein files to the public, or to “show cause” why they shouldn’t.

The government has until July 2 to file responses.

Lawyer and journalist Katie Phang filed suit to enforce the Epstein Transparency Act. The judge has evidently determined that she has suffered harm from being unable to report on the unreleased files, and therefore has standing to sue.

This decision seems like it might be headed for an appeal, but Judge Sullivan declined to stay, or delay implementation, to allow the government time to appeal. So the clock to July 2 is currently ticking.

Bates numbers that are mentioned:

Ordered to unredact names:

• EFTA00749245
• EFTA01187999
• EFTA01930501
• ETFA01928255
• EFTA00628112
• EFTA02648868
• EFTA02504630
• EFTA01022356
• EFTA01703108
• EFTA00038227

Ordered to produce underlying FBI notes:

• EFTA01245620
• EFTA02858481
• EFTA02858491
• EFTA02858495

Opinion: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.291779/gov.uscourts.dcd.291779.16.0_2.pdf

Full court docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73246595/phang-v-blanche/

UPDATE: July 2 is now here. In a move that should surprise absolutely no one, the government decided to produce no additional documents, and they filed a lengthy response explaining reasons why they should not. Short version:

• All of the redacted email addresses are either victims; or the email address appears in both the name and email fields (like “jsmith@gmail.com” jsmith@gmail.com); or in one case Thomas Massie already outed the guy, so there’s no need for the government to comply with the court order (?)
• The government claims that they count people as “victims” if they started out as victims, but later performed reprehensible acts (according to the files)
• One indictment was over-redacted, but they claim it’s okay because they unredacted some of the same names in some other documents. Another indictment only contains redacted “victims.”
• No need to produce FBI interview notes because the FBI always types up exactly the stuff in their notes into the final report.
• Reviewing foreign language documents for release is just too darn hard to do.
• The government plans to publish the redaction log as required, but the law doesn’t put a deadline on that, so the judge shouldn’t either.